Winners of the 2026 Short Story Prize

Molly Antopol’s first book, The UnAmericans (W.W. Norton), was nominated for the National Book Award and won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, the Berlin Prize, the French-American Prize, the Ribalow Prize and a California Book Award Silver Medal. The book was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize, among others. It was named a “Best Book of the Year” by over a dozen publications and was widely published internationally. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Granta and San Francisco Chronicle; in the O. Henry Prize and Pushcart Prize anthologies; and on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Antopol is the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; the American Academy in Berlin; Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow; the American Library in Paris; the University of Venice in Italy; and Columbia University, where she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She has taught at Harvard University and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Additionally, she is on the board of a foundation focused on the critical needs of low-income children and families. 

She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford University and is finishing up a novel, which will also be published by Norton.